Chapter 1: The Land Gap

Key messages

• Continued reliance on land-based carbon removal in updated climate pledges
  As of November 2025, governments’ climate pledges propose using approximately 1.01 billion hectares (ha) of land for carbon removal - representing a slight increase from 990 million ha assessed in pledges submitted by December 2023 - if fully implemented.
• Tree planting carries trade-offs
  Reforestation, plantations and energy crops account for almost 50 percent of land pledged for carbon removal. These activities may compete with other socio-ecological goals, including Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ rights, food security, biodiversity and ecosystem resilience.
• Restoration offers low-conflict carbon benefits
  Restoration accounts for nearly half of all pledged land. Regenerating degraded ecosystems can enhance carbon storage while supporting biodiversity, ecosystem integrity, and the livelihoods that depend on them.
• Land-based mitigation masks limited climate ambition
  A few large emitters account for over 70 percent of pledged land removals, much of it deferred to mid-century net-zero goals. Delaying immediate decarbonization in favour of future land-based carbon removal places the burden onto future generations and undermines the likelihood of achieving a climate-resilient future.
• Most new climate pledges overlook rights obligations
  Even with explicit recognition in the Global Stocktake, NDCs have yet to translate human rights and Indigenous rights into concrete, actionable commitments.
• Conditional pledges can advance equitable climate action
  Conditional pledges from developing countries highlight an opportunity to channel climate finance toward activities that deliver both climate and wider ecological and social benefits.

Chapter 2: The forest gap

Key messages

• Limited ambition despite high potential
  Commitments to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation remain limited in national climate commitments, despite their capacity to deliver rapid emissions reductions and restore ecosystem integrity.
• The growing ‘forest gap’
  A significant gap exists between current deforestation and degradation rates, the reductions required to achieve the 2030 global goal of halting and reversing forest loss and degradation, and existing national pledges. As of November 2025, the combined ‘forest gap’ was almost 20 million ha.
• Forest loss undermines climate and biodiversity goals
  Approximately one-quarter of global forest cover has been lost. Protecting and restoring forests remains among the most cost-effective and immediately available mitigation options, yet annual rates of forest loss continue to rise, undermining progress on both climate and biodiversity targets.
• Forest degradation: the hidden crisis
  Forest degradation occurs at rates even higher than deforestation, although estimates vary depending on the types of impact assessed. Strengthened commitment and capacity to monitor, report and address degradation is essential to quantify emissions and safeguard ecosystem integrity.
• Accountability and equity in forest protection
  Improved accounting to track different states of ecosystem condition and monitor a range of forest degradation characteristics is critical to guide fair and effective action. A global accountability framework is needed to ensure transparent, consistent and equitable standards for defining, monitoring and reporting forest protection.

Chapter 3: From Extraction to Restoration: Transforming Global Economic Governance

Key messages

• Current global economic governance frameworks significantly constrain national policy and fiscal autonomy, limiting countries’ ability to implement actions aligned with deforestation goals. These global rules incentivize and can even directly mandate ongoing extraction of natural resources.

• The current structure of global economic governance - the institutions, rules, decision-making processes and mechanisms that coordinate, regulate and manage international economic interactions - is an important and under-recognized underlying driver of deforestation and forest degradation.

• Transforming global economic governance arrangements that lock countries into extractive sector growth models is critical for realizing global climate and biodiversity goals. Structural policy reforms in critical areas of debt, fiscal policy, tax, trade, capital flows and credit rating agencies are needed to create the conditions for that transformation.

• Forest policymaking has too narrowly focused on creating market or financial instruments that promote private investment in nature and forests, instead of reckoning with the structural global political-economic barriers that many, if not all, countries face. A new economic order is needed that privileges a reparative, rights-based economy over financialized capital for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many.

Chapter 4: Virtuous or vicious? Choosing the relationship between debt, communities and nature

Key messages

• Tropical forests – and the communities who depend on them – need protection during sovereign debt crises. The current business-as-usual model of resolving debt crises deepens nations’ dependence on short-term commodity revenue, pushing plantations, mines and oil wells into previously intact ecosystems – and pushing out traditional communities. This model exacerbates climate change vulnerability and exposes entire national economies to more risk from extreme droughts, floods, fires and tropical storms – making future debt crises more likely.
• A better approach to sovereign debt crises must allow governments the fiscal breathing space to regulate commodity sectors and protect traditional communities and the ecosystems that support them. This means that all creditors – including bondholders, multilateral development banks (MDBs) and sovereign lenders – need to offer meaningful debt relief to low- and middle-income countries.
• New and innovative sources of finance are less likely to lead to cycles of instability and unsustainability. Commodity price-linked bonds decrease pressure on governments to increase commodity production to make up the shortfall and service their debts during commodity price declines. Including natural disaster clauses in bond issuances enables reduced or paused repayments during climate change-linked extreme weather events. Local currency lending and regional payment agreements present a promising approach, allowing governments to avoid reliance on US dollars and instead use local currencies to reduce financial costs and save foreign reserves.

Chapter 5: Tax reform and capturing illicit financial flows for forests

Key messages

• Cross-border tax abuse and illicit financial flows undermine forest and biodiversity protection by depriving Global South countries, in particular, of essential revenue. International financial secrecy also shields multinational corporations and economic elites from accountability and facilitates environmental criminality and corruption.
• The current international tax system is neocolonial in character. It was created by wealthy nations and adheres to outdated principles, enabling massive corporate tax abuse and the degradation of natural resources without accountability.
• The UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation represents a historic opportunity to reorganize the global distribution of taxing rights, to deliver a step change in financial transparency, democratize tax policymaking, confront abusive tax practices and align fiscal justice with environmental sustainability, ultimately creating an international tax system for sustainable development.
• Dysfunctional tax incentives afforded to extractive and fossil fuel industries perpetuate environmental destruction. They contradict the Polluter Pays Principle and deepen socioeconomic and ecological inequalities.
• Conversely, progressive taxation and financial transparency reforms can mobilize domestic resources and advance climate, land and human rights goals. Clear policy priorities should include wealth taxes, progressive environmental surtaxes on environmentally harmful capital and its income, and public beneficial ownership registries.

Chapter 7: Trade policy reform for forest protection and food sovereignty

Key messages

• Effective policy interventions to slow or halt deforestation and forest degradation must be based on a clear, nuanced, context-specific and current understanding of the characteristics and drivers of commodity trade. Food sovereignty and ecosystem protection are mutually supportive goals; support and commitment to both will point to better pathways forward.
• The deregulation of trade and investment law have contributed to the creation of highly concentrated agricultural commodity value chains. This pattern sees the greater share of the benefits of commodity production accruing to private, mostly foreign firms while governments have to find the resources to pay for the fallout from a sector that externalizes environmental costs and exploits farmers and food system workers. These costs include deforestation and, ironically, producers living in poor and, too often, hungry households.
• International trade relationships reinforce the policy advantage that commodity value chains have over food producers and food markets, despite the fundamental importance of food security to a state’s well-being. Trade agreements attract investors and redirect public attention and public spending away from local markets and local food production. The failure to see corporate interests and behaviour clearly has resulted in many unkept promises, thwarted policies and continued forest devastation.
• International commodity markets are rooted in a colonial history of exploitation of Global South countries for Global North consumption that still shapes assumptions about where and how the Global South should obtain capital and what their development pathway looks like. These assumptions undermine efforts to build economic development along alternative pathways that focus on Indigenous knowledge, domestic needs and preferences, and use ecological principles to guide land use and forest management.